The hardest working rocker in show business, the godfather of punk and heavy metal, wizened philosopher, shameless hedonist and virtually indestructible, presenting Lemmy Kilmister.

Lemmy talks about how the new, twentieth Motorhead album is shaped by the current political climate, and his his anger at the BP oil spill. “You can love the individual, but you can’t love the race… we’re arrogant bastards. We’re like a dose of crabs”, and adds that human cooperation could learn from our smaller fellows on this spinning planet: “talk to the ants, they’ve got communism working.”

The new Motorhead video ‘Get Back In Line’ and Lemmy’s thoughts on John Lennon after the jump….

Striking a blow straight to the heart of celebrity vanity, the newest edition of the Popbitch newsletter contained the following item:

Neatly proving just how ineffective social media actually is, 18 celebrities (and Jay Sean) sacrificed their “digital lives” for charity last week, vowing to stop updating their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Social network silence from Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake and others until their fans donated a million dollars to [Keys’] Keep A Child Alive campaign to help fight AIDS.

With six days gone, donations were still under $300k. The celebs got restive - Usher just plain gave up and started tweeting - so a billionaire patsy, and longtime AIDS funder Stewart Bahr, was drafted in to pay it off.

It would have cost the celebs’ 35 million combined followers less than 3 cents each to buy back their lives and get them tweeting again, so it appears their fans are staunchly pro-AIDS, or no-one really cared very much about what they had to say in the first place.

Laying down that kind of bread, couldn’t Bahr have pushed his weight around even a little bit and negotiated a way to still keep Kim Kardashian off Twitter?

“The Girl from Ipanema” is one of the most “covered” songs of all time and an “elevator music” cliche the world over. The story behind the bossa nova standard, is so well-known to most Brazilians that our readers there might find this a really obvious thing to write about, it’s not so well-known anywhere else, I don’t think. (Well, at least I didn’t know this story until this morning, when my friend rock critic Michael Simmons hipped me to it).

Ipanema is trendy, beach town in south Rio deJaneiro. Near Ipanema Beach was Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim’s favorite hang-out, the Bar Veloso. Every day, the married musician would await the arrival of a “tall, and tan, and young and lovely” young girl who would pass by the bar on her way to the beach, never making eye contact with the bar’s patrons, even when she came in to buy cigarettes for her mother.

Jobim invited his friend, a writer and poet named Vinicius de Moraes to come by the Veloso to see this girl. Eventually, after several days had passed, she walked by. Jobim said to his friend, ““Nao a coisa mais linda?” (Isn’t she the prettiest thing?) and de Moraes replied, “E a coisa cheia de gracia.” (She’s full of grace). Moraes wrote their banter on a napkin and this exchange became the seed from which the original Portuguese lyrics of “A Garota de Ipanema” (“The Girl from Ipanema”) grew.

A few years later, “The Girl from Ipanema” as performed by Astrud Gilberto, João Gilberto and Stan Getz, from album Getz/Gilberto became one of the top-selling records of 1964. Only the Beatles outsold the song and it was nominated for, and won, several Grammy awards.

Heloísa Eneida de Menezes Paes Pinto was a born and raised Rio de Janeiro girl – a true carioca. The daughter of an army general from whom her mother divorced when Helô was 4, she grew up on the Rua Montenegro, some blocks up from the Bar Veloso. At age 17 she was shy and quite self-conscious: she had crooked teeth, she felt she was too skinny, she suffered from frequent asthma attacks, and she had an allergy that reddened her face. And on her way to and from school and on her treks to the beach, she had to walk by the Bar Veloso.

Although the song had been around since 1962, it wasn’t until 1964 that Helô learned the truth. Friends introduced her to Tom Jobim, who still hadn’t worked up the courage to talk with her. But with the ice finally broken, he set out to win her heart. On their second date, he stated his love for her and asked her to marry him. But she turned him down. Two things got in the way. Helô knew Tom was married and that he was “experienced,” whereas she was inexperienced and would not make him a good wife. The other was that she had been dating a handsome young lad named Fernando Pinheiro from a prosperous family in Leblon since she was 15. Undaunted by her refusal, Tom told her that she was the inspiration for the song. This confirmed the rumors she had heard from others and, of course, thrilled her beyond imagination, but she still turned him down.

The world would not learn the truth until 1965. Tired of all the gossip and particularly concerned that a contest was going to be held to select “the girl from Ipanema” Vinicius de Moraes held a press conference. In a detoxification clinic in Rio where he was undergoing treatment (you’ve got to love poets), and with Helô at his side, de Moraes told the world. And he offered her one more testament:

“She is a golden girl, a mixture of flowers and mermaids, full of light and full of grace, but whose character is also sad with the feeling that youth passes and that beauty isn’t ours to keep. She is the gift of life with its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow.”

Although Helô became an overnight sensation, Brazil was a very conservative country at the time and she did not take advantage of the modeling contracts and movie roles she was offered, opting instead to become a mother and housewife, marrying Fernando Pinheiro the following year.

That might have been the last the world would have heard of Helô Pinheiro, but in the late 70s Pinhero’s companies fell on hard times and Helô gave birth to a handicapped son. Although reluctant to do so her entire life, faced with the situation she was in, Helô decided to capitalize on her identity as “the girl from Ipanema” and became a successful model, gossip columnist and television host. She endorsed over 100 products.“You move mountains, when it comes to providing for your children” she said.

In 2003, at the age of 58 and still quite lovely, Helô Pinheiro appeared with her own daughter, supermodel, actress and reality TV star, Ticiane Pinheiro in the pages of Playboy magazine, making her their oldest model, ever. She now owns a line of swimwear and boutiques under the “Garota de Ipanema” name.

Seeing as how we’re all echoing each other’s classic rock memes here on the DM lately, here’s yet another Zep song that at least I had been previously ignorant of. This is evidently dating from the 1978 rehearsals for their final album, the deeply uneven In Through the Out Door and maybe called Fire. Like a few of the others posted by Richard, this is a rough rehearsal tape but I found it exhilarating to listen to. After a minute or so of random noodling you are suddenly a fly on the wall in a room with the mighty Led Zeppelin as they tease you with a song which while having many of their trademark idiosyncratic elements, is utterly new to you. Like a dream, really. Did that actually just happen?

Hey, what’s a little bait and switch during a presidential election, huh?

I have never voted for a Republican in my entire life, but it sure feels like I have with Obama… The tax cut deal for millionaires and billionaires is a moral outrage and it’s going to be wrapped around his neck come next year when the GOP refuse to raise the debt ceiling.